Many tasks undertaken by humans involve repetitive motion. The industrial revolution is a byproduct of organizing and simplifying a process by breaking it down to a series of repetitive actions. In every situation where an individual is faced with repeating a task, inevitably the question arises: Can the job be done more efficiently?
For the purposes of example only, and not by way of any limitation, tagging trees is one activity of land surveying in which several hundred trees and sometimes thousands must be tagged as fast as possible. Typically, the best efforts result in tags being applied at a rate of approximately three hundred per day during the course of a surveying project. The conventional technique for tagging trees is to use a hammer, a sack of nails, and a set of tags. The chief complaint of the manual technique is that it is slow and cumbersome, particularly in less than perfect field environments. This prior art process is cumbersome in that it requires manual handling of a tag, then the nail, then aligning the nail and tag on the tree and then hammering the nail multiple times until the tag is fixed to the tree. Thus there is a need in the art for an apparatus and method for applying tags that is easy to handle, quick, accurate, automatic and inexpensive.